AN APPRAISAL OF THE HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT OF THE REDEEMED CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF GOD UP TO 2016

The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), London (United Kingdom) is one example of the transnational networks of African Pentecostal churches that have changed the Christian landscape in Britain. The proliferation of RCCG parishes in London and nearly all the urban cities in Britain further reaf-firms previous scholarly claims that Pentecostalism is a religion made to travel. The theoretical entry point of this paper is to identify the internal dynamics of RCCG that have enhanced the missionary agenda of the denomination particularly in London, situating it within the broader missionary endeavours of the denomination in the West and North America. This paper examines the interface between migration, mission and church growth of the denomination in London. The paper further explores to what degree RCCG has utilized the urban church planting strategy of St Paul in its church planting agenda as well as identifying and prescribing solutions to the missionary challenges of the denomination.keywords RCCG, mission, London, Pentecostalism, church planting A new mission Era Mission was predominantly a white man’s territory even up to the first decades of the twentieth century. A total of 1,215 people attended the 1910 World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh but were overwhelmingly white, male, and western:to be precise, 1,009 men and 207 women. 1 Only 18 non-westerners (all male)came from what were termed the ‘younger churches’in the mission lands: eight Indians, four Japanese, three Chinese, one Korean, one Burmese, and one Turk.21 Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, Grand, 73.2 Ibid, 92.journal of the european pentecostal theological association, Vol. 36 No. 1, April, 2016, 80–93© European Pentecostal Theological Association 2016 DOI 10.1080/18124461.2016.1138631 These 18 non-western Christians did not attend as delegates of their own churches,but only as guests of western missionary societies or the organizing committee.Apart from these 18, nearly everyone else came from Europe and North America:510 British, 490 North American, 171 from continental Europe, 28 from the British colonies of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Africans were not rep-resented at all, except by expatriate missionaries and eight white South Africans.3 Jack Hayford was later identified as the only representative of the African continent at the Conference almost a century later through the scholarship of Brian Stanley in 2009!4 According to Stanley, African Christians and their churches were still looked upon as ‘primitive, childlike, unimportant’.5 However, the history of Christianity in the twenty first century will be incomplete without the inclusion of a chapter on the exponential growth of African Christianities in and in the Diaspora. According to Andrew Walls, ‘if you want to know something about Christianity, you must know something about Africa’.6 Strictly speaking, mission in this twentyfirst century will be totally different from what it has been in the past two centuries.For instance, African Christianities 7and especially Pentecostalism are not geo-graphically delineated; they are quite visible in West and North America –andhave now become global.8The spread of African Pentecostalism has largely beenassociated with the forces of globalization, migration and the declining fortunesof western Christianity which have mainly been consigned to what is called‘private space’. Western Christianity has lost its influence in the social, religious,and political sphere.9 To encounter the richness and diversities of African Christianities in Britain, all you might need is just a day bus pass card to Old Kent Road in South East of London. Rogers observes that ‘Old Kent Road [in Southwark Borough, London]has become something of a shop window for their growth, proclaiming the globalization of Christianity’ 10with over 25 Black Majority Churches (mostly African-led Pentecostal Churches) on a road less than 1.5 miles long.African-led Pentecostal churches are the most visible variety among the different genres of the new African Christianities that have burgeoned in Britain as well a sin North America, especially in the period from 1980 till today. These churches have emerged in two ways. The first way has been through churches in the diaspora that have branches and parishes of mother churches with headquarters in Africa. Atypical example amongst several others is the Redeemed Christian Church of Go